Shooting the Daylight

33rd Symposium on Time Organization Among Earth-Dwellers (Agna, Galactic Year 917)

Translation by Fabius Seltzer in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree in Human-Alien Interfacing, G.Y. 1266

Welcome, everyone, to our little conference! It has been a terrific year for the field of Human Studies, and I am very much looking forward to the spirit of intellectual adventure and sublime humility that we have all felt at conferences past, standing as we are at the base of a reservoir of knowledge so deep that our grandchildren’s grandchildren may well consider ours a rich and unexplored topic, a field that they may find worthy enough to devote their lives to, as have each of us. They will regard us as pioneers, trailblazers, and our names will adorn the theories they debate.

Some of you may be thinking that “little” sends the wrong message. There are some who claim that an academic discipline is only as big as its pretensions, that we ought to “fake it until we make it” (¹) to secure ourselves the prestige of our fellows and the funding we require.

But I must be honest with you all: we are less a conference that a coterie. Since a flurry of interest at the release of the trove of sensor data captured by our deep-space probe, the scientists on this planet have left Human Studies for topics more amenable to their methods.

It is for this reason that I must bluntly take stock of the state of our field. Since our inception, we have exhaled members faster than an arpindorf at sngig-time. We have a single source of data and not the slightest chance of obtaining any more until the next probe passes by the Earth planet, a prospect none of us will see in our lifetimes. The data we do have consists of low-quality video, taken by the lightweight and rudimentary probe as it passed by the planet. We observe perhaps six weeks of lighting patterns, and two and a half weeks of more granular activity on the surface, including glimpses of what we surmise to be transportation arteries and the blurry outlines of buildings.

The road before us is a lonely one. We will spend our lives poring over a single dataset, its gaps and contours as familiar to us as our mother’s faces. There will certainly be no in interest from the press, and even our friends and families will find our theories esoteric and - if you will excuse the pun - alien.

In any event, we have gathered today to debate one of the strangest phenomena yet observed among the Earth-dwellers, to wit: the stark irregularity of their activity patterns. It is a mystery of profound importance, a critical piece in the puzzle of discerning their modes of thought and activity.

For those of us unfamiliar with the study of time-organizing among the Earth-dwellers, I will give a brief background of the problem. Their custom is to divide the period of their planet’s rotation into two parts. The first “active” portion is distinguished by several features: occasional changes to the planet’s surface (what many believe to be new construction, though talk to Yarro for an alternate view), clogged arteries, and higher levels of thermal radiation.

During the second “rest” period, we observe very little change on the planet’s surface, and we estimate that only 1/50th of the population is active. I would be remiss if I did not mention that we owe that figure to an excellent demographic treatise by Yant and Ferdo, true intellectual blesdigs, and we are very pleased to have Ferdo in attendance today.

But I digress.

The mystery we have convened to discuss is this: the rest period almost always lasts for a third of the planet’s rotation. I say almost because there is exactly one instance where the period is 12.5% longer than usual! All subsequent periods are of their regular length, but they are shifted forward in time by 1/24th of a rotation.

Many theories purport to explain this strange phenomena. One camp holds that it is clearly an error in measurement or a glitch in transmission; another that it must a compensating measure taken by the Earth-dwellers to align their planet’s rotational period to its orbital period; and yet another that the delay is a ritual behavior to mourn the death of a political leader.

It is our privilege, and our burden, to ponder this mystery today. Let us begin!